Director Ben Wheatley on 'Sightseers'

"Sightseers" director Ben Wheatley: "Life is all about these weird moments. That's kind of where it's at for me."

"Sightseers" director Ben Wheatley: "Life is all about these weird...

The surly vacationers in the black comedy "Sightseers" use rocks and sticks to kill random strangers they encounter at bucolic English tourist attractions. The blunt-force murders may seem shocking in their simplicity, but director Ben Wheatley figures the Hollywood notion of a complex criminal mastermind is long overdue for a reality check.

"Usually, murder is grubbily done by grubby people in a totally unplanned way," he says. Referring to Sherlock Holmes' famous nemesis, Wheatley adds, "There is no Moriarty."

Actors Steve Oram and Alice Lowe wrote the "Sightseers" script and double as the psychopathic leads who travel by RV to such quaint northern England sites as the National Tramway Museum at Crich, the Ribblehead Viaduct and the Pencil Museum in Keswick.

"I liked these anarchic characters, even though what they're doing is abhorrent," Wheatlely says. "The other thing I really liked is that they were traveling across England visiting all these museums and talking about a time when the country was great.

"Everyone's looking backward, not forward. Then these characters end up on a mountain acting almost like cave men. It's kind of a time-travel film, and that appealed to me."

Wheatley, who made the low-budget "Down Terrace" and "Kill List" before "Sightseers," likes to give his thrillers an offbeat edge.

"Ever since 'Down Terrace,' I've been trying to get these weirdly syncopated rhythms of life into the movies," he says. "I try to make the characters feel more real, even though they're dealing in genre situations, because life is all about these weird moments. That's kind of where it's at for me."

True story of survival at sea in WWII drama

The cast and crew for "Ghosts of the Pacific" are taking a Memorial Day break from their re-creation of the true story of three World War II Navy flyers who survived a 1942 crash and struggled to survive without food or water in a 4-by-8-foot rubber raft.

The movie, which is being filmed at Baja Studios in Rosarito, Mexico, features Garret Dillahunt, Jake Abel and Tom Felton.

"The men in 'Ghosts of the Pacific' faced seemingly insurmountable odds, and yet they never gave up," says American Film Company CEO Joe Ricketts, who serves as the movie's executive producer. "They were America's first heroes of the Pacific war."

'Elysium' director grounds sci-fi with realism

In his 2009 directorial debut, "District 9," Neill Blomkamp used an alien invasion as a metaphor for racism.

In the long-awaited follow-up, "Elysium," which opens in August, the South African filmmaker pictures a futuristic sci-fi scenario in which a handful of wealthy people (including the hard-nosed Secretary Rhodes, played by Jodie Foster) live in a space station hovering above a pollution-ravaged earth.

"A sci-fi take on haves and have-nots became a very compelling idea to me," Blomkamp said during a question-and-answer session after a recent preview screening in Los Angeles.

Set in 2154, "Elysium," which stars Matt Damon as an impoverished Earth-dwelling renegade, was filmed in part near a giant garbage dump on the outskirts of Mexico City. Blomkamp wanted to infuse the story with as much real-world imagery as possible.

"For all the visual effects guys, if they couldn't show me reference from some mega project like the Yangtze River Dam or some huge expansion bridge in Canada - something of that scale - then it didn't belong in the film," Blomkamp says.